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Comment Re:what if (Score 1) 168

Use the bone analogy. A fractured bone is a fault. After it heals, if you leave it alone, do you ever worry that the pent-up pressure will fracture it again on its own? And yet, if someone drilled into your (healed) bone fracture and injected it with high-pressure water, might it fracture again and then start moving?

Comment Re:Good luck with that. (Score 5, Insightful) 168

They (the owners of the company, not the pseudo-person company itself) would happily agree to those terms, knowing that they are protected by investor and bankruptcy laws, and eventually their own deaths and inheritance laws. Those terms are thus meaningless. Long-term environmental protection must be done through preventative regulation, not through post-damage punishment, as the time scales ensure those responsible cannot be adequately punished.

I'm not making any claim as to whether fracking causes long-term environmental damage (though I'm happy it's not happening under my house), just pointing out that if it did, reactive punishment wouldn't stop it.

Comment Re:Hello, Netflix! (Score 4, Insightful) 121

Netflix doesn't have a choice here; they get most of their content from licensing deals and likely were pressured into this by those providers.

The best thing you could do is support netflix and watch their original programming, so they can make more and cut out the established Big Content providers. (Until Netflix becomes one and we move on to the next new thing.)

Comment Re:noooo (Score 1) 560

If it's still hot it's not waste, it's fuel. Reprocess that shit and use it again. Build all the nuclear plants on military bases (or give them military-style security) if the paranoid need to for security, but stop making reprocessing a taboo as it can greatly reduce the "spent" fuel problem.

Comment Re:What I like (Score 3, Interesting) 155

Land dependency is Magic's number one flaw. It always has been. If there had been a rule like "You can play any card from your hand face down as a land that you can tap for one colorless mana" the game would be very different, but less flawed.

Mana screws, though, occur more on the game level than turn level. If you aren't in a game where you are screwed, your turns are based on strategy after randomness, i.e. draw a card then plan what you want to do based on the known board and hand state, with the pseudorandomness of your opponent's choices to keep play somewhat uncertain.

Comment Re:cooperative game (Score 1) 155

The issue is that the inexperienced players need to just do what the experienced ones tell them to, if the team wants to win. This leads to coops being dominated by the most vocal & experienced player. That player could just as easily play by himself, playing all the hands, as a solitary game.

That's why I don't care for most coops, at least.

Comment Re:Where the losers feel like they also won (Score 2) 155

The problem with cooperative games is that many of them devolve into the most dominant personality running the show, i.e. if we want to win, everyone has to do what the smartest person says they should. Games of this sort that allow recovery from the bad decisions of one team mate are often trivially easy if all the players are equals and execute flawlessly.

Party games, like Cards Against Humanity, or Telestrations (where we too don't keep score) are just for fun, but also don't remotely tickle the itch of someone looking for the intellectual challenge a strategic board game provides. Dixit perhaps gets closest for me, as I play into the strategy of predicting who might play what based on how well I know them.

Comment Re:Strategy over luck (Score 1) 155

Settlers is incredibly random, but also is affected greatly by the pseudorandomness of other player's actions. After initial town placement, before the first turn begins, some players can be at such a disadvantage as to be unlikely to win.

Ticket to Ride doesn't suffer from this problem, because competitive players know the routes, predict the paths of those in the lead, and block them.

I agree that some randomness is necessary to level the playing field, as otherwise you have a game like chess and it's boring if you aren't well matched to your opponent. As I posted elsewhere in the thread, games that feel fun are games of luck + strategy, where something random happens but then you can make the best of it through meaningful choices. Games of strategy + luck (i.e randomness after decisions, rather than before) can feel frustrating if the randomness undoes the planning. Luck + no meaningful decisions (monopoly, candy land) is just stupid if you are over 10.

Comment Re:The right amount of randomness (Score 2) 155

The difference also lies in how the randomness affects you. Games where you make choices, then a random event occurs (like a die roll) to resolve everything can feel frustrating. On the other hand, games where something random happens, then you make (meaningful) choices based on it, feel more empowering to the player.

Talisman - Random event (die roll) followed by sometimes-meaningful choice (which direction to walk) followed by random event (card draw)
Alien Frontiers - Random event (dice roll) followed by meaningful choices (how to manipulate and deploy the dice)
Monopoly - Random event (die roll) followed sometimes by obvious "choice" (whether to buy or not) or by no choice at all (pay rent)
Power Grid - Random event (power plant card draw) followed by meaningful choices (what to bid, where to build, what to power)

Any of these games can be fun to the right sort of people in the right mood, but games where meaningful choices aren't nullified by a die roll tend to attract more replayability from the adult board game crowd. I'm neglecting the pseudorandom effects of other players actions on your choices (such as a shortage of fuel in power grid, or someone else building where you wanted to) because understanding and predicting the strategies of your opponents is a learnable skill.

Games where nothing random ever occurs (i.e. chess) can garner high devotion, but to be enjoyable they also need to be complicated enough to require significant skill to master (i.e. tic-tac-toe has no randomness other than who goes first, but is not enjoyable once you are older than six). These games can also be frustrating if there is a skill gap between players.

Comment Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making.. (Score 4, Insightful) 386

Forbes is driven by MBA-types looking for next-quarter results. Of course they don't understand the concept of long-term research. If anyone today has taken up the mantle of research dropped by Bell Labs and GE, it would be Google and Elon Musk.

While some of Elon's ventures are public (now), the pure research is all done with his private money. Only Google is doing research as a public company with loud investors who'd rather pump-n-dump.

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